AbstractHistoryArchive Description

This picture book is a part fairy tale, part parable that tells of a man falling asleep in a park one day and finding himself the caretaker of a rare bird that has built a nest on his head. Ironical at times, it is a book for readers of all ages.

Notes

For children aged 5 and over.

Other formats: Also braille.

Affiliation Notes

This work is affiliated with the AustLit subset Asian-Australian Children's Literature and Publishing because it has been translated into Chinese.

Works about this Work

yPlaying with Picturebooks : Postmodernism and the PostmodernesqueCherie Allan,
Houndmills:Palgrave Macmillan,2012Z19095882012single work criticism Abstract"Postmodernism has played a significant part in the development of playful and experimental picturebooks for children over the past 50 years. Playing with Picturebooks offers fresh insights into the continuing influence of postmodernism on picturebooks for children, covering a wide range of international picturebooks predominantly from the 1980s to the present. It represents a significant contribution to current debates centred on the decline of the effects of postmodernism on fiction and detects a shift from the postmodern to the postmodernesque. Playing with Picturebooks draws on a wide range of critical perspectives in examining postmodern approaches to narrative and illustration. Chapters discuss how metafictive devices enable different modes of representation, offer different perspectives to authorised version of history, and promote difference and ex-centricity over unity. Playing with Picturebooks is essential reading, not only for academics in the field of children's literature, but also for researchers, teachers and students." (Back cover)

Men/Boys Behaving Differently: Contemporary Representations of Masculinity in Children's LiteratureKerry Mallan,
2001single work criticism — Appears in:
English In Australia,November
no.
1322001;(p. 57-64)Abstract'Crisis' has been the password of recent writings about boys, masculinity and manhood from
popular journalism to academic press. In all of these often disparate accounts there is the
attempt on the part of the writers to find an anchorage in the storm, to utter a temporary
'truth' on the current state of affairs. In a similar way, the cause for the so-called 'crisis in
masculinity' is just as diverse.With this brief outline of the discourse of 'crisis in masculinity' in mind, this paper will
2
consider what contemporary writing for young people can offer in terms of the current issues
impacting on masculinity. In particular, specific questions will emerge as part of the
discussion: How are writers for young people contributing to critiques of masculinity (and
gender generally) through strategies of parody, self-reflexivity, and subversion? In reading
these fictional accounts, does a more serious account of current anxieties lie beneath their
playful surfaces? How might students benefit from an engagement with these and other texts
in terms of their developing understandings of gender in general and masculine subjectivities
in particular?

Men/Boys Behaving Differently: Contemporary Representations of Masculinity in Children's LiteratureKerry Mallan,
2001single work criticism — Appears in:
English In Australia,November
no.
1322001;(p. 57-64)Abstract'Crisis' has been the password of recent writings about boys, masculinity and manhood from
popular journalism to academic press. In all of these often disparate accounts there is the
attempt on the part of the writers to find an anchorage in the storm, to utter a temporary
'truth' on the current state of affairs. In a similar way, the cause for the so-called 'crisis in
masculinity' is just as diverse.With this brief outline of the discourse of 'crisis in masculinity' in mind, this paper will
2
consider what contemporary writing for young people can offer in terms of the current issues
impacting on masculinity. In particular, specific questions will emerge as part of the
discussion: How are writers for young people contributing to critiques of masculinity (and
gender generally) through strategies of parody, self-reflexivity, and subversion? In reading
these fictional accounts, does a more serious account of current anxieties lie beneath their
playful surfaces? How might students benefit from an engagement with these and other texts
in terms of their developing understandings of gender in general and masculine subjectivities
in particular?

yPlaying with Picturebooks : Postmodernism and the PostmodernesqueCherie Allan,
Houndmills:Palgrave Macmillan,2012Z19095882012single work criticism Abstract"Postmodernism has played a significant part in the development of playful and experimental picturebooks for children over the past 50 years. Playing with Picturebooks offers fresh insights into the continuing influence of postmodernism on picturebooks for children, covering a wide range of international picturebooks predominantly from the 1980s to the present. It represents a significant contribution to current debates centred on the decline of the effects of postmodernism on fiction and detects a shift from the postmodern to the postmodernesque. Playing with Picturebooks draws on a wide range of critical perspectives in examining postmodern approaches to narrative and illustration. Chapters discuss how metafictive devices enable different modes of representation, offer different perspectives to authorised version of history, and promote difference and ex-centricity over unity. Playing with Picturebooks is essential reading, not only for academics in the field of children's literature, but also for researchers, teachers and students." (Back cover)